Open Framework for Analyzing Public Parliaments Data

TL;DR

The paper introduces the CAPD framework, a comprehensive open-source tool for collecting, parsing, and analyzing large-scale parliamentary data to monitor government activities and identify anomalies.

Contribution

It presents a novel, generic framework for large-scale parliamentary data collection and analysis, enabling insights into government activities and anomalies.

Findings

CAPD successfully collected over 64,000 parliamentary protocols.

The framework identified anomalous meetings and key event dates.

It demonstrated effectiveness in monitoring parliamentary activities.

Abstract

Open information of government organizations is a subject that should interest all citizens who care about the functionality of their governments. Large-scale open governmental data open the door to new opportunities for citizens and researchers to monitor their government's activities and to improve its transparency. Over the years, various projects and systems have been processing and analyzing governmental data using open government information. Here, we present the Collecting and Analyzing Parliament Data (CAPD) framework. This novel generic open framework enables the collection and analysis of large-scale public governmental data from multiple sources. We used the framework to collect over 64,000 parliaments' protocols from over 90 committees from three countries. Then, we parsed the collected data and calculated structured features from it. Next, using the calculated features, we utilized anomaly detection and time series analysis to uncover various insights into the committees' activities. We demonstrate that the CAPD framework can be used to identify anomalous meetings and detect dates of events that affect the parliaments' functionality, and help to monitor their activities.